Umami VPS Docker Hosting

Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused, open-source web analytics platform built as an alternative to Google Analytics. It tracks pageviews, visitors, referrers, countries, devices, and custom events in a clean real-time dashboard, supports many websites from one instance with team accounts, and ships reports for funnels, journeys, retention, and goals. Because it is self-hosted, all of the visitor data stays in your own database on hardware you control.

Umami is lightweight. It is a Next.js application that needs a current Node.js runtime (Node 18 or newer) and a PostgreSQL or MySQL database. A small instance runs comfortably on a single CPU core and around 1 GB of RAM, and resource use scales mainly with traffic volume, the number of tracked websites, and the size of the dashboard queries rather than with anything heavy on the application side.

Umami serves its dashboard and tracking API on TCP port 3000 by default. Production deployments place an HTTPS-terminating reverse proxy such as NGINX in front of port 3000, with a TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt and the upstream pointing at 127.0.0.1:3000 on loopback. The tracking script is then served from your own HTTPS domain so that analytics requests are first-party rather than blocked as third-party.

Umami needs little RAM. A small to medium instance runs comfortably on around 1 GB of RAM for the Node application, with additional memory allocated to the PostgreSQL or MySQL database depending on traffic. Busy instances tracking many high-traffic sites benefit from 2 GB or more, mostly to give the database room for its working set, but the application itself stays light compared to heavier analytics platforms.

Yes. PostgreSQL is one of the two supported databases for Umami, alongside MySQL, and is a common choice for production self-hosting. Umami uses the Prisma ORM to talk to the database, where it stores every pageview, event, website, and user account. An SSD-backed PostgreSQL on a VPS keeps the high volume of small inserts from tracking and the heavier dashboard read queries fast even as your traffic and history grow.

Yes. The self-hosted edition of Umami is fully free and open source under the MIT license, with no seat fees or capacity limits for any use. Umami Software also runs Umami Cloud, a managed hosted version with free and paid plans for teams that prefer not to operate their own server, but the self-hosted application you run on a VPS includes the complete feature set at no license cost.

Umami stores all of its data in a relational database and supports both PostgreSQL and MySQL through the Prisma ORM. PostgreSQL is the common choice for production self-hosting. The database holds every pageview, event, website definition, and user account, so it is the single thing that must be backed up to preserve a complete Umami instance, and an SSD-backed Postgres keeps inserts and reporting queries fast as traffic grows.

Two install paths are official. Run the Umami Docker image (ghcr.io/umami-software/umami) alongside a PostgreSQL or MySQL container, or clone the source and run it with a Node.js runtime and your own database. In both cases you set the DATABASE_URL to point at PostgreSQL or MySQL and an APP_SECRET for session signing, then run the database migrations before the first start. After that, you add the tracking script to each website you want to measure.

Yes. Umami is privacy-first by design: it does not use cookies, does not collect personally identifiable information, and anonymizes the data it records. Because of this, most Umami deployments do not require a cookie-consent banner and stay aligned with privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and PECR. Self-hosting strengthens this further, since all of the first-party data lives in your own database rather than on a third-party advertising platform.

Umami covers the core of what most teams use Google Analytics for — pageviews, visitors, referrers, geography, devices, custom events, and UTM campaigns — in a far simpler, faster, and privacy-respecting package. The key differences are that Umami is self-hosted so the data is entirely yours, it does not use cookies or collect personal data so it usually needs no consent banner, and its tracking script is tiny. It does not try to match every advanced advertising and attribution feature of Google Analytics, which is exactly why it stays light and private.